Anguish

enigma and certainty

Abstract

The text aims to show how the elaborations introduced by Lacan in the seminar about Anguish, by subverting the classical conception of anguish, also promote a new conception of certainty that will be decisive for analysis. In this new conception, certainty is not extracted from arguments, as philosophy proposes. It also diverges from Lacan’s own previous conception, according to which certainty would be reserved for the psychotic subject, when it emerges from the encounter with the enigmatic void correlative to the phenomenon of the broken chain, in which the signifier is detached and acquires its value since it returns on the real. However, while in psychosis, certainty is linked to the enigmatic signifier, from the seminar on Anguish onwards, Lacan elaborates another possibility for extracting certainty, this time no longer linked to the symbolic dimension, but rather to the gap that opens up between the signifiers and through which a real implicated in the experience can be verified. Anguish is an index of this real and, as an affect that doesn’t lie, it participates in the possibility of extracting certainty at the end of an analysis. A certainty that is no longer linked to the expectation of finding the perfect idea, but rather to an experimentation of the affect that produces a conclusive assent, which, in turn, no longer involves any ambiguity.